Introduction to Google Analytics with case studies to show the analysis process.

1. Google Analytics
Jay Murphy
Trionia Incorporated – The Science of Marketing
jmurphy@trionia.com
Twitter
LinkedIn
877-234-0591

2. Google Analytics – Agenda
A Whirl-Wind Tour of Google Analytics
 Why you should use Analytics?
 How to install
 Definitions
 Case Studies
 Resources

3. Why use Google Analytics
Who has questions about a website?
 Site Owners
 Ad Agencies – Online and Offline
 Site Developers – Design & Technical
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4. Answers
Question Analytics can help answer
 Who is visiting the site?
 How are people finding the site?
 What will bring more people to the site?
 What are people doing on the site?
 Are people accomplishing the site goals?
 How can the website be improved?
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5. Analytics Tools
The top analytics tools
 Google Analytics
 Site Catalyst - Omniture
 Coremetrics - IBM
 Webtrends
A few open source choices:
 AWStats
 Webalizer
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6. Accuracy?
 Analytics is not Accounting
 Focus on Trends – Focus on Changes
 Don’t try to reconcile two tools – they will be
different
 For metrics with monetary value – define
the one tool in advance
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7. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
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8. How to Install
Google Analytics is easy to install:
 Using your Google Account, access Analytics:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
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9. How to Install
(continued)
Fill-in the information on the form:
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10. How to Install
(continued)
And receive your tracking code:
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11. Installation & Check
 Place your tracking code on each page of your
site
 Use a tag checker – like Google Tag Assistant
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12. Check
(continued)
 For more complicated installations use the
Google Analytics Debugger
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13. Definitions
Unique Visitors
A unique user who accesses a Website, while people cannot be identified by
analytics, we substitute computers. So a single computer that accesses a
website is deemed to be a Unique Visitor. (Most analytics tools use
cookies, small files saved by a browser, to determine if a machine has been to a
website before. Since many users, estimated to be 25% or so, remove cookies
on a monthly basis, unique visitors can be overstated.)
Visits
A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified
client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. So
for a user who visits at 11:00 AM and then again at 11:20 this user counts as a
single unique visit; if the user clicks on a new page at 11:35 it now counts as
two visits. (Some analytics packages use the term session in place of visit.)
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14. Definitions
(continued)
New Visitors
A visitor that has not made any previous visits. Again, since New Visitors are
also determined by the use of cookies saved on a visitors computer; visitors that
delete cookies show as new visitors.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page
without visiting any other pages on the site in between. (In general a higher
bounce rate is not a good sign – but some websites are designed for a single
page view before leaving, for example blogs. Use bounce rate to analyze your
site based on your site’s users goals.)
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15. Definitions
(continued)
Average Pages per Visit
The average number of page views a visitor views before ending their visit. It is
calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of visits.
Average Time on Site
Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit.
(This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs cannot
measure the length of the last page view, since the time is measured by start
time of second page minus the start time of the first page.)
Page Views
A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An
occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single
page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the
page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.
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16. CASE STUDIES
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17. GE MCS – SEO Performance
6 businesses
7,000+ page website
Improve SEO
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18. GE MCS – SEO Performance
(continued)
 SEO is not an overnight process
 Regular optimization and reporting
 Measure SEO performance across businesses
and parent company, using:
 Profiles for each business
 Goals – to measure Leads
 Advanced segments for search behavior
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19. Profiles
Profiles – report on specific parts of a site.
We use filtering
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20. Goals
Goals measure desired action – New Leads
So we setup Goals
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21. A Quick Analysis
Using a Reporting Tool GA DataGrabber
www.ge-mcs.com | Goal starts, all goals
1,600 google
1,400
1,200
1,000 bing
800
Goal starts, all goals
600
400 yahoo
200
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 17 16 15 18 21 20 yandex
Page depth
Other
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22. A Quick Analysis
(continued)
To learn more – create a Custom Segment for
visitors with 3-4 page views
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23. A Quick Analysis
(continued)
Largest Source/Medium is Google/Organic
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24. Analysis -> Action
Optimize for Top 9 Keywords
Use SEO Tool for ranking (SEOMoz, ZoomRank…)
Assess competitors
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25. Middlesex Bank – Campaign
Landing Pages
- Business
- Consumers
Effective?
How to improve?
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26. Measure Goals and Interaction
Setup Event Tracking
Event Flow shows user interaction
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27. Complex User Interaction
Business Landing page
- Audio
- Video
- Pop-up Text
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28. Complex User Interaction
(continued)
Events Again
- Track Play, Pause, Resume, Stop and Complete
play: function() {
pl.removeClass(this._data.oLink,this._data.className);
this._data.className = pl.css.sPlaying;
pl.addClass(this._data.oLink,this._data.className);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'audio', 'play', this._data.oLink.id]);
},
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29. Complex User Interaction
(continued)
Visitors had the opportunity to listen to radio ads or
read them.
Almost three times as many read the transcript
Action – include transcripts for audio information
read
listen
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30. Analytics Resources
 Blogs
 Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
 Books
 Web Analytics Demystified – Eric T. Peterson
 Web Analytics 2.0 & Web Analytics an Hour a
Day – Avinash Kaushik
 Education
 Google’s Analytics IQ

31. Other Resources
(continued)
Twitter
 Follow the #measure, #analytics and
#ganalytics hash tags
Organizations
 Web Analytics Association
 The Analysis Exchange – Students and
Mentors team up to assist Non-Profits
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32. SEO Resources
SEO Links:
 Google’s SEO Guide
 SEOMOZ Beginners Guide to SEO
 Wordtracker SEO Intro Video
Intro to sitemap.xml and robots.txt
 http://www.advancedhtml.co.uk/robots-
sitemaps.htm

33. How it works
JavaScript that uses first party cookies
 Sends an invisible GIF to the analytics server
for processing
 Users that delete cookies will be seen as a
new visitor
 No personal identifying information is saved
 Cached pages are still tracked if visitor is
connected to the internet
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34. Google Analytics Cookies
__utma
 Used to measure unique Visitors – 2 year
__utmb
 Session/Visit measure – 30 minute timeout
__utmc
 Session/Visit with __utmb – no expiration
__utmz
 Stores referral information. Including Source
and Medium. 6 months from set/update.
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35. Google Analytics Cookies
(continued)
__utmv
 Contains information passed by the _setVar()
Google Analytics method
__utmx
 Used by the Website Optimizer.
More Detail at:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/conc
epts/gaConceptsCookies.html#cookiesSet
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36. Other Ad Sources
 Use the Google URL builder
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
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37. Multiple Campaign Tracking
Visitors can visit from multiple campaigns.
 In the standard setup, the most recent
campaign will get credit for a conversion.
How to assign credit to the first campaign?
 Setting utm_nooverride=1 in your campaign
URLs will attribute the conversion to the first
campaign.
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